Ethel graduated from normal school, then taught first through eighth grades in country schools, mostly one room, for four and a half years before she married Arthur. Their first three years of marriage were spent a few miles out of Gadsby, Alberta, on a rented farm. It was in the small log house on that property that their first child, Jeanne, was born. Ethel had been to the hospital on a false alarm; but when she really needed to be in the hospital, a terrific rainstorm had made the roads full of gumbo mud. Arthur's sister, Elsie, a nurse, was there and the doctor arrived on horseback, just in time.
Jeanne was about three years old when the family moved to a larger nearby farm, called the Wells Place. While living there, Donald, Fred and Norma were born in the Stettler Hospital, twenty-five miles away. In 1938, they, with Granddad Dent Northgraves and son, moved to Chilliwack, British Columbia where Arthur became a successful dairy farmer and later contracted some house building and renovating. Ethel and Arthur are both buried at the cemetery on Little Mountain, Chilliwack.
